Ways to Align Social Media Marketing With Content And Goals

The way to align your social media with your goal is to always remember your website’s funnel and why it exists in mind. Here I explain why.

Quite often in social media marketing, people put the cart before the horse. They start their social marketing campaign, without really having a goal or a plan in place. The result? Their social media campaign is sporadic and largely ineffective as it lacks a clear message and direction.

If on the other hand, your social media marketing does have a clear goal, then you can do a wide variety of things across different platforms and types of media, while still giving the feeling to your viewers and readers that it’s part of a cohesive whole. It still feels to the people who follow you that what you’re doing is part of an overarching strategy that they can understand.

Now that’s worth it, as when your marketing campaign appears to have a strategy, then your company appears to have one as well. The question, however, is how do you do that? That is what we’re going to spend the rest of the article on.

The basics

Whatever your plan might be, it always comes down to this simple formula:

These are the three essential ingredients to a good online strategy. Yes, you need traffic. That’s vital. If, however, that traffic doesn’t lead to conversions and those people don’t end up buying your product, then your strategy isn’t working. For that reason, before you launch yourself fully into a social media marketing campaign, make sure that you’ve got your website properly set up.

Make sure that when people arrive at your website and your content, they’ve got chances to convert. Also, even as you start to draw in more traffic to your website, make certain that you keep checking back to see whether pages are converting correctly. The best way to do that is to look at behavioral flow diagrams in Google Analytics and similar apps.

These will let you know if a percentage of your visitors are indeed heading towards the pages ‘deeper’ in your website and if that percentage is sufficiently high. Then do the same thing for conversions to revenue. This will make it far more likely that you’ll actually spot the problems that your website has.

Remember your goal

Your goal is to sell your service. For you to reach that goal, you have to make sure that you attract the audience that actually wants to buy your service. This might sound obvious, but a lot of people don’t carefully consider who they want to reach out to and instead of reaching out to their customers, end up reaching out to the people they’d like and want to impress.

For example, you might find a lawyer’s office website that writes content for other lawyers, or you might find a writer whose blog is directed at how to make other writers better and earn more. Sure, those lawyers and those writers might really appreciate and be impressed by what you want to say, but they’re not buying your services.

They’re going to land on your content and think ‘what the hell is this?’ or, even worse, ‘why do I care?’ and move on to a site that actually caters to them. You’d be surprised how many websites do this. Make sure you’re not one of them and you’ll already have a leg up on the competition.

From conversion to social media

Now, there are many ways to convert visitors. Some will go straight to your product page. Most will need a little more time. This latter group you want to sign up to your newsletter, as then they can get used to your brand and – by way of the mere exposure effect, among other things – they’ll become more likely to buy.

For that reason, you’ll want to find some strategy that will get people to sign up for your newsletter. The most common and effective way is to offer them something in return. This could be an ebook, but could just as easily be something like a WordPress plugin, a course, or anything else that will pull people in. Of course, that on its own is not enough.

A few people might sign up for your newsletter, but unless you show the value they might well be those people that sign up for every newsletter and it will be hard to get heard in the clutter of their inbox. The way to show value is through your blog ad content.

There you don’t only hint at what your free lessons, ebook or plugin contains, but also present content that demonstrates that you know your subject. For this reason, don’t focus on creating a huge amount of content, but creating very high-quality content. In fact, producing overly much content can be counter-productive, as it satiates the curiosity of the audience and makes them less likely to give you their information.

The focus is on high quality, as that will demonstrate that what you’ve got to say has value and then they’re far more likely to pay for your ebook with their email. For that reason, make sure you make your content informative and interesting and don’t do it alone. Instead, get a writing service or a professional editor involved. The next step is to market that content through your social media.

Always remember this structure

The important thing to realize is that only when each step naturally leads from the last one, will your strategy actually be effective. If you’re creating content simply to draw in visitors through your social media, then you might well draw visitors, but the chance that they will convert is very low.

It is also far more likely that you’ll end up creating content that isn’t really about your central goal. Instead, content should always be planned with the thought in mind that it is meant to make people sign up for your newsletter (of course, if a few buy your product as well, so much the better). Only if you keep that in mind will the visitors naturally flow down your funnel and actually satisfy the goals that you’ve set for your website.

Of course, you always want to be looking at ways to make this strategy more effective. For example, you’ll want the reason that they sign up for the newsletter to fit in with the wants and needs of your actual audience. Again, it’s possible that you offer the wrong product and end up drawing in the wrong audience.

So don’t be afraid to tweak different sections of this structure to more closely fit your goal. Try offering a product more in line with your audience, then find the types of content that will draw in the people who will sign up. You can see through Google analytics and other statistical analysis programs how effective this strategy is.

Last words

You can’t just ‘do’ social media marketing. If you just ‘do something’, even if it does entertain people and get you some engage, the chance will remain small that you’ll actually draw in the audience that you’re looking for. And that will mean those people will visit and drop away afterward.

Instead, you’ve always got to be aiming your campaign at getting the right people to move down your sales funnel and as I’ve explained that means you’ve got to move backward. You start with who you want to have to buy your product and then let that inform what you’ll offer for your newsletter.

That, in turn, informs your content and that informs who you reach out to on social media. Only if your website is streamlined in this way, will you actually gain traction? Otherwise, you might as well just be spinning your wheels in the air for all the good it will do you.